It's time of year again for all good little boys and girls to follow Santa's journey around the globe using the pinnacle of technological innovation-- the teleprinter-- to do so.

For the uninitiated, this is an ITTY-like broadcast where reports of where Santa was sighted and the circumstances of that sighting are broadcast periodically as the reports are verified. Our eyewitness reports provide a unique, intimate tracking experience particularly enjoyed by kids aged one to 92.

Tune in whenever you can at http://tty.nerdology.org:8080/santatrack using the same configuration as you would for standard ITTY autostart. NOTE: this URL will result in a 404 error until 15 - 30 minutes before the first test message on the 23rd.

The schedule will be as follows:

December 23, 3:00 PM MST - A test message followed immediately by a Christmasy RTTY art (some pix will have overstrike) will be broadcast every hour on the hour for this and the following 11 hours, which should give all global time zones some chance to tune in before tracking starts
December 24, 3:00 AM MST - Based on prior timetables, we expect Santa to begin his journey and the reports of sightings to start coming around this time
We will track Santa for the following ~24 hours as reports of his whereabouts and descriptions of what he's doing keep coming in, with these brief messages likely rolling in roughly every 10 - 20 minutes dependent upon how the sightings go this year. You may consider keeping a good ol' fashioned globe or atlas handy to follow along.

Not to get into the weeds, but I have attempted supporting USOS (unshift on space) for the past couple of years, and while I thought it was working last year it ended up not, I am unable again to support it this year due to a bug I found in the implementation of USOS in the software I use to generate tones (fldigi) for which I can't compensate. Those who have USOS on receive enabled, if you can disable it, that's advisable, though if not, it should only be a minor inconvenience, manifesting mainly in timestamps not printing correctly. I'm considering rewriting the broadcasting scripts to wrap around minimodem instead of fldigi, which should give me total control over aspects like USOS and CRCRLF, among other benefits. A project for next year.

Merry Christmas, 73,

Jordan Spencer Cunningham

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